Varieties of therapies and drugs for use in those therapies have emerged and administration methods have become complicated due to recent advancement of medical treatments. Accordingly, therapies in which a plurality of medical pumps (syringe pump and infusion pump) is used at a time for one patient are on the increase. Also, systems managing the flows of administered medical fluids from plurality of such medical pumps and alarm information such as a drop in residual low battery/occlusion of an infusion line have been proposed.
A system in which visual contact is made with the displayed states of alarms in such a medical pump system is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 5-7623 specification.
A schematic diagram of a system in which medical pumps independent of one another are connected to a personal computer via communication cables, and flow volumes and alarm information of the medical pumps are collected and displayed as application software of the personal computer is shown in FIG. 2.
Also, a schematic diagram of a type of a pump monitor system in which pumps share a power supply line and a data communication line with one another through a power connector 53 and a communication connector 54, and medical pumps 51 and 52 are connected in such a manner that they are stacked one after another on a base unit 55 comprising a display unit 101 on which the flow and alarm information for each pump is shown in FIG. 3.
Furthermore, in the case of such a system, in addition to collection of pump information, control such as stop/start of infusion by pumps and change of flows can also be performed from the personal computer and the base unit.
FIG. 2 shows a conventional medical pump system, wherein reference numeral 20 denotes a personal computer with system application software installed therein, reference numeral 21 denotes a display device (display unit) such as a CRT and a liquid crystal monitor connected to the personal computer, reference numeral 22 denotes communication port expanding means such as a multiplexer for expanding communication ports of RS 232C that are typically provided with only one or two channels to 4 channels, 8 channels or the like, and reference numerals 23, 24, 25 and 26 denote medical pumps. Also, reference numeral 27 denotes a patient, and medical pumps of 23 to 26 deliver individual set liquid medicines into the patient.
FIGS. 4A to 4C show cases where the same number of medical pumps as in FIG. 2 are used to perform administration for one patient, wherein their administration passes are different from one another due to the condition of the patient, administrated drugs and the like. For example, FIG. 4A shows a case where four pumps each have individual infusion lines and drugs are injected into different points of the patient, and FIG. 4B shows a case where two infusion lines of four medical pumps are connected with each other and the other two infusion lines are also connected with each other. Also, FIG. 4C shows a case where four medical pumps are all integrated into one line to carry out administration for the patient.
It is important in safe administration that the state of the infusion line is ascertained correctly, and there are various patterns as to states of infusion lines as administration passes to the patient in this way, but in fact, it becomes very difficult to identify the points of the patient into which the medical fluid is injected if infusion lines running from a plurality of pumps are connected with one another and cross one another.
However, conventional pump monitor systems have no functions to display infusion lines on the system, thus making it difficult to ascertain the state of infusion lines correctly.
Also, on the other hand, when a system in which one or more external apparatuses (hereinafter also referred to as “slaves”) such as infusion pumps, syringe pumps, blood-pressure monitors and urinary volume monitors are connected to a host machine to manage and display the operation conditions of the apparatuses is built, works of:                (1) setting a communication protocol of nodes        (2) sending a request command        (3) receiving data and confirming the reception        (4) carrying out control in accordance with data are performed at the host machine side.        
As a matter of course, the loads on the CPU of the host machine are increased if these processing are performed at high speed, and real time quality is compromised if a large number slaves are connected. Also, even if a system is made such that processing is distributed over a plurality of CPUs like a CPU (main CPU) engaged in processing of controlling and displaying slave conditions in the host machine and CPUs (sub CPUs) engaged in communication with each slave, enormous development costs are required for both main and sub CPUs due to addition of slaves and change of specifications, although processing at the main CPU is slightly curtailed.